Allahabad University:2 New Centres For UGAT & PGAT

The Allahabad University which failed to get sufficient number of Schedule Caste and Schedule Tribe candidates against the 7.5% quota in all the curses run by the university has now decided to conduct UGAT (Undergraduate Admission Test) and PGAT (Post Graduate Admission Test) in two other centres.

The new centres include Bilashpur and Lucknow. The director of AU admissions, Prof BN Singh said "AU, like many other institutions, has not been able to fill the seats reserved for ST candidates for past many years. So in order to reach out to the tribal population in Chhattisgarh we have added Bilaspur among the list of outstation test centres".

The main motto of adding Bilashpur as a centre is that, Bilashpur is the educational hub of Chattisgarh, where they expect to have substantial number of candidates especially in SC and ST category for acquiring admissions in Allahabad University.

Moreover, AU has also reserved around 7.5% of the total seats in every course for ST candidates along with the 15% for SC candidates. While the seats reserved for SC gets filled every year, most of the ST quota seats are lying vacant.

As the new centres were added, AU had to cancel Bhubaneshwar, but again Bilashpur would cater to the aspirants from the cancelled city. Another reason for why Bilashpur was chosen is that a large number of people from UP and Bihar have migrated there and adjoining cities like Raipur, Durg and still they prefer studying in Allahabad University.

In a bid to emerge as all India level university, AU started holding UGAT, PGAT, MBA and CRET in other cities in addition to Allahabad from 2007. Although the number of applicants at outstation centres were not encouraging initially, the trend has improved in past three years.

Last year, UGAT and PGAT were held at Patna, Bareilly, Bhopal, Varanasi, Gorakhpur, Bhubaneswar and New Delhi. The officials revealed that apart from Lucknow aspirants from its neighbouring districts like Sitapur, Harsoi, Kanpur, Barabanki and more were finding it hard to reach Allahabad. Hence the university has taken Lucknow as one of its centres.

Along with the new centres the exams shall be even held at Bangalore and Mumbai as well.